1970s PanAm Life Rafts Repurposed As iPhone Cases

Last seen wrapping the iPhone in chopped-up fire hoses, the folks at Station Supply Co have expanded (pun most definitely intended) into recycled airliner life rafts. That’s right: now you can cover your iPhone or iPad with a swatch snipped from a genuine 1970s-era PanAm life raft.

Things were different on commercial airlines back in the 70s. Flight attendants were called stewardesses, men could smoke, and instead of video screens, seat backs contained automatic spankers which would give screaming children a stout whack across the head to shut them up. Happy days indeed.

Now, we have to put up with absurd “security” procedures and stand in giant microwave ovens before we even get on the plane. Worse, I have been forced to ditch my hip flask full of scotch and resort to a plastic bottle of colorless gin which I pass off as “bowel medicine.” Human dignity isn’t what it used to be.

As we shake ourselves out of that nostalgic reverie, let us take comfort in the knowledge that a part of that proud past is being preserved, by chopping up old life rafts and turning them into rear skins for iPhones and iPads, tough and light protectives shields for our gadgets.

The irony is, of course, that the 1970s man would never have been seen dead recycling anything. That crap was for soap-dodging hippies. No, real men would have burned these rubbery tributes to the oil industry and fed the smoke to rare albino pandas, or something. And they would have left their cars out in the parking garage with their engines running while they did it.